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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
the new facility. IT contracted with BOKA, RWB, L.A. Fuess and Pacheco Koch in early spring for the start of formal design.
BOKA Architects, RWB (MEP engineers), L.A. Fuess and Ponce-Fuess (structural) and Pacheco Koch (civil) successfully teamed on previous work on the airline's campus.
"They designed our TOPS building in 2012/2013 which had similar criteria of tornado proof structure and redundant utility service for our network operations center," he said. "We created a balanced team of our in-house project managers, BOKA/consultants and McCarthy. As a team, we focused on the design, cost and schedule of the project to meet the delivery of the program."
Dan Cummings, project executive with McCarthy Construction, said the firm was hired by Southwest in March 2016. The company recognized the aggressive schedule the airline put on the project and the importance it had for its overall business plan.
"It's pretty rare to get a project that you recognize right away that you have the ability to impact the future business plans of an owner," he said.
Southwest needed to get the pilot simulators online in a timely fashion because the airline is adding additional flights and international service and all of the aspects of it needed to be signed off in a timely fashion to meet the business goal of having the simulators running by Aug. 1, 2017. By May they had to have the units in place because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was scheduled to be at the facility.
McCarthy had a year to complete the project.
"Facing a project where there's an end date that you know is not going to move and being concerned with having no control over weather and no control over owner changes, it really makes you sit up and take notice that you need to put the right team on the job for one thing, but you have to hire the right subcontractors and you have to control a good deal of the work yourself to maintain as much control as you can," Cummings said. "With that in mind, we determined that we needed to self-perform as much of the concrete work as possible."
McCarthy needed to hire 80 to 100 concrete workers for the project, Cumming said, while competing with all of the other construction projects taking place in the Dallas area.
"We didn't have that many guys on our payroll," he said.
Cummings said they attracted workers by identifying how unique the project was and the amount of overtime made available in part to a scheduled six-day work week. McCarthy also assured the workers competitive wages compared to the rest of the market.
"Wings" is the latest addition to Southwest Airlines' Love Field headquarters campus. The complex consists of a 425,000-square-foot office building and an attached 380,000-square-foot flight training center. A 1,950-space pre-cast concrete parking structure along with surface parking provide for a total of 2,500 vehicles. Aerial Photography, Inc.
May 2018 airportbusiness 9